Unsolicited Advice

I don't like getting unsolicited advice, so I have a rule that I never give any. However, since rules are made to be broken, here is some unsolicited advice to anyone considering taking ballroom dance lessons.

The first piece of advice is to figure out why you want to learn to dance. Is someone you care about getting married and you want to do more than the "high school shuffle" at the happy event? Are you looking for a hobby that helps you stay fit and is a lot more fun than calisthenics? We just wanted to be credible when we went somewhere there was dancing. We started dance lessons because my wife had always been interested in learning ballroom dance but the opportunity never really presented itself. She tried to find a studio to take lessons when she was a kid, but there just weren't any ballroom studios in Boise, Idaho during the 70's. She was looking through the catalog from the County Recreation Center a few years ago and saw that they offered ballroom dance lessons on a night we weren't doing anything anyway and they were relatively inexpensive. She wanted to go and I couldn't think of a real good argument for not going, so she signed us up. These were group classes that were held once a week at the local recreation center.

My second piece of advice is to look around for the studio and instructor that fits you. We started with group classes to learn the basics, but after a while we felt that we needed more individual attention to get to the level of proficiency that we wanted. We wanted to add to dance steps we had already learned so we found a studio that did both group and private lessons. We would go to the group lessons to pick up new steps and work with our instructor to polish what we had learned. This did build up the number of dance steps we knew rather quickly. We left that studio because of traffic and rising gas prices. One night we were scheduled to go to a group class and traffic was so bad we arrived just in time for the class to be over. We went looking for a studio that was closer to home and easier to get to. We found the studio where we currently take lessons. Our instructor is very patient and has a lot of experience both with dancing and with instructing. This is something else we have found when we have taken lessons from different instructors. Just because someone knows how to dance, doesn't mean they know how to teach. Our instructor has seen all of the mistakes that we make many times before. He is adept at being able to explain what we are doing wrong. If he sees that we just aren't getting it, he tells us in another way. If you are looking around you will find dancers who try to teach and less often dancers who can teach. It is pretty rare to find a teacher who is an expert dancer and can break down the steps in a variety of ways depending on how the student learns.

The third piece of unsolicited advice is to practice. Early on we could tell the couples who took the lesson and didn't practice the whole week until the next class. They would take up time in the class going over the last lesson. If you're spending money and time taking lessons, don't waste it by not practicing. We take our lessons on Monday night. We generally practice on Tuesday, go out dancing on Wednesday, practice on Thursday, go out dancing on Friday and Saturday night, then go to a practice session at the Recreation Center on Sunday afternoon. OK, so we tend to go overboard. Some people go to the gym; we go dancing. It gets worse. So that we had enough room at home to practice we got rid of all the furniture in the living room, tore up the carpet and refinished the floor. When we started we used to practice on the deck, much to the amusement of the neighbors.